Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday July 21, 2005 @12:12PM
from the doing-it-up-right dept.

An Anonymous Reader writes: "The Firefox team has decided to scrap the planned 1.1 release (already in Alpha 2) and instead release the final version as 1.5 due to the significant number of bug fixes and changes. The 1.5 feature complete beta is expected next month." From the article: "We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs."

Then again, I'm not really complaining about it. All the available extensions out there have got to be giving the Mozilla development team more to consider for the next stable releases. Consider, also, that the other (major) alternatives are broken and commercial (IE and Opera). Not that the latter is bad, but for such a fantastic browser to be completely free and have a wide range of extendability is something that must be accounted for.
Then again, if they've already changed the release schedule once, wh

Not that I use it, but I feel I must point out that IE is free. Isnt that kind of why opera gets crushed? It's a commercial software package squashed between an awesome free package that you need to download, and a sub-par package that likely comes with your computer.
P.S. I dont use opera either.

Internet Explorer is free about like it is free for me to have sex with my wife. Sure, no money changes hands for the act, but believe me, getting the package the sex is "bundled" with is very expensive.... Way too many diamonds, not enough pearl necklaces....
I am happy with Firefox. I do not think that I would ever pay for a browser however, even if it was really great. I guess we have all been conditioned to want free browsers....Your browser is NOT Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Close this window and re-open.

Well, it's not free. If I want to install it on my computer in my office, I'm going to have to install Windows, and that means I'm going to have to buy a license. Instead I have Firefox running on an Ubuntu install and don't need to pay any license fee.

The worst part of the tragedy of Microsoft's domination is the illusion that components like IE are actually free. I hate to break it to you, but you know the plastic toys inside cereal boxes that said "Free Whiz Bang Balloon Racer", well it wasn't free, and neither is Internet Explorer.

With Firefox, you have a free choice of hardware to run it on. You can run it on PowerPC hardware, or you can run it on x86 hardware, unlike IE 6. Currently, if you want to run IE 6 (with Trident layout engine) on a Mac, you have to pay Microsoft for Virtual PC and Windows XP. Or if there is a large number of people on another kind of hardware, they can all pitch in to fund a port of Gecko to another platform; Microsoft would never allow that.

You're also free to upgrade your Firefox installation independent of your hardware or your operating system. In order to upgrade to IE 7, on the other hand, you have to toss out Windows 98/ME, Windows 2000, or Wine/GNU/Linux in favor of Windows XP with slipstreamed Service Pack 2 ($200).

No, because if you read the post, it says that a 1.1 release would be different from a 1.5 release. The 1.1 release would simply fix some bugs without introducing many new features. The 1.5 release will contain the bug-fixes, as well as the new features. So, no, it would not be more appropriate to say that.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate and less alarmist to say that Firefox 1.1 will instead be called Firefox 1.5?

If the headline had said that, the slashdot editors probably wouldn't have even looked at it in the submission queue. The more alarmist entry grabs attention better, so has a greater chance of getting published. Basically, nothing to see here, move along.

I was running 1.0.4 and just happened to notice the mozilla.org slashblurb about a new version. I checked and the new version was 1.0.6 which had major security updates, yet when I did Tools->Options->Advanced->Software update nothing was found (and this is simply a manual way to trigger the normal update mechanism). If the update software can't find a new version with major security updates then what good is it?

One of the main advantages of 1.5 is the improved update system. Everyone knows that the 1.0 one was not up to scratch that's why they spent a lot of effort improving it. Based on current nightlies I'd say they've done a good job.

It now looks like what was 1.1 will be 1.5, what was 1.5 will be 2.0 and what was 2.0 will be 3.0

This makes some sense, a lot more work on what was 1.1 has taken place (mainly on the automatic update and enterprise deployment side) so it warrants a 1.5 designation.

Whether 2.0 and 3.0 will be significantly different then we won't know until the time but as long as the product is good people will use it. I used it back in the 0.x days (before it was even called Firefox) and it still beat IE and the Mozilla suite in many ways. So whatever version numbering scheme they use is fine by me.

I've spent the morning reading WONTFIX bugs on the Firefox text zoom issue. I'm feeling down on the browser just now.

There is no good option for making text zoom permanent if you have bad eyes. You can kludge by zooming default fonts and then disabling everything else in CSS.

The people working on Firefox are not interested in fixing this because "text zoom breaks page layouts." The fix that they've decided on, which may or may not come someday, is a page zoom feature that zooms everything. (Raise your hand if you love sideways scrolling.)

I am amazed at the lack of consideration for people with bad eyes -- it's not a small number of people either. Mozilla composer bends over backwards to enforce alt tags for images, but when it comes to usability nobody cares.

Maybe we'll start to see some consideration of this sort of thing once the average age of open source coders hits 50 and they find themselves having to squint more often.

There probably is an extension. The one I was able to find hadn't been updated in some time and didn't work with the last few releases, but I didn't scour the extensions page. I could probably find something if I were interested in using this myself.

Saying "that doesn't matter, it's fixed by an extension" is one of the big problems with Firefox. This is a basic usability issue. Is it going to be fixed in the browser itself, or will it get shuffled off into extension-land where it has to depend on some

Well, no, it's not a better option. For those who don't need the feature, it makes the browser bloated.

What they need is to include these crucial extensions in the installer as optional packages. The firefox installer should come with a laundry-list of important extensions nicely bundled together and thoroughly documented so that a user can either a) just get the minimum or b) make it a point to grab the tools they need. It keeps the core browser light, but it means that people with specific (but common) wants/needs don't need to go hunting around the extension page.

Just get Opera. For years (as in, since their Windows 3.1 days) they've supported a zoom feature that enlarges text, graphics, and even Flash animations. They also support CSS-based modifications that, with one or two mouse clicks, render a site easily readable by anyone with bad eyes, no tolerance for Comic Sans, and/or people who disagree with the decision to render a page in 7-point grey-on-white text [nynewsday.com].

Firefox and its army of extension developers will eventually re-implement Opera, but in the meantime the real thing is much better.

Obviously you haven't used Opera. It does zoom both text and images, but doesn't make you scroll sideways because it wraps text on the screen. Unless you zoom in to, say, 500%. But then one word is 1000 pixels wide so you had that coming.

There is no good option for making text zoom permanent if you have bad eyes.

Have you tried specifying a CSS user stylesheet? According to the CSS specification, user styles are supposed to supercede any styles delivered by the content provider (excepting those flagged !important, which almost no one does)...

I feel I should point out that if you're running Windows, one of FF's abilities is to zoom the text or enlarge it simply by holding down ctrl and scrolling the mouse wheel (if you have one) to make text larger or smaller. It's not permanent, but it's alot simpler than having to use some additional plugin to make it work. It only takes a mere moment to get the text to the size you want.

I haven't tested this on my Linux box, as it's primarily in command-line mode for about 95% of the time I'm using it.

...they stopped new development on Firefox altogether and got Thunderbird a little more stable.
Oh.....and they need to get that lightning calendar [mozilla.org] integration working, too. Then I could actually think about moving my organization over...

The timing of this seems very unfortunate. With 1.1, we were likely only a month or so away from having real, native SVG support in a major browser - and likely *before* IE7 was released. That might have given SVG a chance to be noticed for real by the public in a way that hasn't happened yet; maybe even enough to put pressure on the IE team to actually implement it themselves.

With the new delays, there's every chance that the IE7 betas will be out before SVG has a chance to become noticed by the general public. That just seems... unfortunate.

Does slashdot suddenly have something against Mozilla / Firefox? This reminds me of the "Mozilla suite discontinued" and the "Thunderbird (some version) canceled" stories. These could EASILY be re-worded to put a more positive spin on it.

How about: Firefox leaps ahead to 1.5!

Going on to describe: The vast number of improvements to Firefox has warranted a larger version increase, skipping over 1.1 the next release will be 1.5...

Similarly the previous stories could have been "Mozilla.org focuses exclusively on Firefox" and "Thunderbird flies ahead to version (number)".

Of course it didn't help the previous two were copied out of context from Mozillazine articles. Hmm... I don't see anything about this at all on Mozillazine yet.

Anyway Slashdot should be trying to help Mozilla.org and Firefox, not trying to sensationalize every change.

Please - take the gloves off just because it's an OSS project. My personal experiences with the fox have been rapidly going downhill. I have it running on three machines right now, it's eating up 56MB, 98MB and 100+MB of system memory on each of the machines. I was hoping that they would have the resource leaks fixed in the upcoming release, but if I have to wait much longer - I am jumping ship.

The lack of progress made since 1.0 is really dissapointing. It seems like they put everything they had into

Having worked in a corporate infrastrucuture for far too long, I have to sadly say, that the biggest enterprise drawback to the use of FireFox is the lack of a Admin kit, that would allow you to customize which extensions you push out with Firefox.

It would also be nice to have an MSI based installer for easy deployments via exisiting application deployment engines (AD, SMS, Zenworks, etc) and the ability to customize the broser via Group Policy.

I know all of these only apply to the Windows world, but I think these kind of things would help Firefox in the long run.

Posts like this bother me. They really do. Here is someone who for the sake of arguement really is someone in IT who works with large corporations and has the authority to roll Firefox out.

One of the things he desperately needs to get Firefox out there is an MSI installer version.

Any yet he couldn't be bothered to type "firefox msi" into google where he'd fine exactly what he is looking for. I know Firefox isn't perfect, but come on don't go putting up artifical barriers to it when a solution is so easily

Please, somebody mod the parent up. When a Fortune 500 company makes a major IT move, they spend months prepping for it, looking at edge cases. What if the node to which we're deploying is unreliably connected? What if we run out of disk half way through? Will the changes roll back if the moron user turns the box off during a dritical phase when it looks like nothing's happening? etc., etc., etc. They depend on the vendor having already tested the main execution path has been thoroughly tested.

Is this a jump to appease the version-number junkies? to jump 1/2 a version number closer to IE7 or Opera 8? What is this for, because regardless of how many bugfixes they've thrown in (yeah yeah, and changes, too) it wont warrant a leap to Firefox 1.5 - coming from a self-confessed version-number chaser (posting from a Deer Park Alpha nightly I downloaded hours ago) this just smacks of WinAmp's jump from 3 to 5 just to sound like they'd 'advanced'. What happened to the old system?

(*).*.* is for rewrites or when the software reaches a seriously major milestone.
*.(*).* is for major bugfixes and changes, like this release will have.
*.*.(*) is for minor bugfixes.

Now I understand the logic of PHBs preferring 'Firefox 1.5' to 'Firefox 1.1.34g' or whatever, but it's sad to see the the old system of version numbers for categorisation seems to have descended into a battle of "look, we have teh numborz!!!".
Why not just call it Firefox 9 and get one over on MS and Opera in the number stakes?

As I understand it, it's not at all a political move, it's certainly not just to have a higher number. As I understand it, the way Firefox development works is, there's the CVS HEAD, which I guess you could consider similar to the 2.5 kernel series back in the day - unstable and quickly changing. Every so often, they make a branch off the head that will become a stable release. These releases are kind of dead ends, but that allows them to be more stable and have more static APIs. So what this article actually means is, a while after the 1.0 fork, they started the 1.1 fork, but now they've decided that even the 1.1 fork is too far behind the head, and so they've opted to focus their stabilization efforts on the 1.5 fork, which already includes bugfixes that would otherwise have to be backported.

There isnt any logic behind version numbers, that's why they're making news out of stuff like this. As far as i'm concerned, I don't really care about what version number my browser is, as long as it's the latest, and it doesn't start with IE.

The only reason people use IE over FF is because they're ignorant. The majority of people (according to website stats) still use IE.If they use IE now, why would they even consider swapping to FF when their much-loved browser gets a huge update with all the features and security measures they think they need?

Alternatively, they release FF before IE7, get a bunch of publicity and some more users while they can.

Don't play games with MS. They have enough money to do whatever they wa

Perhaps its just my system, but I've been actually lesshappy as the version numbers went up. I've found it to beless responsive, more likely to either crash or time outon connections, and just in general act flakey. And thememory use can become excessive. (what is it doing with125Mb of memory?)